What porn searches reveal about the repressed desires of men and women

Data from porn sites like Pornhub is a gold mine for social scientists who study human behavior. One of them is Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, author of Everybody Lies. In a recent interview, Stephens-Davidowitz shared his analysis of porn searches and what they reveal about society. What stands out from this research is that there is a large gap between what people say they like or do openly and their behavior online.

Overall, the data show that there are many more homosexual men in the closet than we believe; That many men prefer overweight women to slim women, but that this preference is not something they admit; That married women are worried about whether their husband is gay; That many heterosexual women see lesbian porn; And that pornography that shows violence against women is more popular among women than among men.

Stephens-Davidowitz emphasizes a remarkable subject, which is that people are afraid to act in the world according to their true desires when they are politically incorrect: “For example, I am sure that a large number of men are more attracted to overweight women than to thin women, but try to date thin women to impress their friends and family. “This shows an essential social pathology, a kind of massive confusion in which a lot of women make extremely stressful efforts to stay slim and thus get a partner, but their partners are actually attracted to bodies that weigh more – more normal bodies and natural, at least in the society of the many developed countries. So this is highly inefficient.

Another interesting global trend is that in India, men want to see breastfeeding in adulthood and women are searching Google “My husband wants me to breastfeed.”

5% of men are only attracted to gay porn. 20% of women who watch porn, see lesbian porn. A somewhat disturbing fact is that pornography that shows violence against women is much more popular among women themselves and this does not have significant variations in different parts of the world, ie it is not correlated with how women are treated in different countries.

In the United States the main question women have about their husbands is if they are gay, and this grows even more in the states of the southeast.

Only 20% of the total porno seen these days is about vaginal sex that leads to orgasm between two heterosexual people. In the meantime, the pornography of caricatures, anal sex, oral sex, sex with the feet, incest, porn of the third age, animal porno, sex with objects grows. This shows that, of course, sex is not just about reproduction.

“Probably 30% of people see porn exclusively that you would find unpleasant,” concludes Stephens-Davidowitz.